Guns of the Canyonlands Read Online Free Page B

you stop this?”
    Dawson shook his head, the rifle in his hands quivering. “Clem here wants you dead, son, and so would Mr. Laytham if’n he was here. It ain’t up to me to stop this thing. Best you make your peace with God and take your medicine.”
    “Go to hell,” Chance Tyree said, knowing further pleas were useless.
    Daley looked up at Tyree. “Hard thing for a man to die with a cuss on his lips.” The huge lawman stepped to the back of the dun and slapped the horse on the rump.
    Startled, the animal darted forward and Tyree bumped over the high cantle of the Denver saddle and swung free, the noose yanking tight around his neck. A million stars exploded inside his skull and he found himself choking, battling for breath. He kicked his legs, desperately fighting for life as he slowly strangled, the merciless noose mocking his efforts.
    There came a noise like thunder as a gunshot trembled loud in the air—then a sudden shock of pain like someone had crashed a sledgehammer into his left side . . . and Chance Tyree knew no more.
     
    He woke to darkness. Floating somewhere above him, a man’s face swam into view and he heard a voice ask, “How are you feeling?”
    Tyree tried to talk, but found no words, only a raspy croak that quickly died in his throat.
    “You take it easy,” the man said. “You’re hurt real bad. You can talk later.”
    Mustering his strength, Tyree lifted his head a few inches off the ground. He tried to speak again, and this time managed a feeble, “Who . . . are . . .”
    “Who am I?” the man finished for him, and Tyree saw the blurry hint of a smile in a long, melancholy face. “Why, they call me Owen Fowler.”
    Tyree laid his head back on the grass. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.
    And he let the darkness take him again.
     
    The night was shading into a pale amber dawn, a solitary star standing sentinel in the sky, when Tyree woke.
    For a while he lay still, desperately trying to remember what had happened to him. After a few moments, it began to come back to him, fitting together piece by piece—the fight in the saloon and then his run-in with Clem Daley and Len Dawson. But much of it was still hazy, like a half-remembered dream, faces moving like ghosts through the dim verges of his memory.
    He turned his pounding head and looked around him. A tall, lanky man with the face of a martyred saint was squatting over a small fire, a coffeepot smoking on the coals. Beside him lay a Henry rifle and farther away a big buckskin grazed near the stream, a few fallen leaves from the cottonwoods lying on his back.
    Tyree struggled to rise, but could not muster the strength and sank back to the ground. He heard the rustle of a man’s feet through the grass, looked up and saw Owen Fowler towering over him.
    “So you’re still with us,” Fowler said. “Couple of times during the night I sure thought you wasn’t going to make it.” The man shrugged. “Your breathing slowed and I felt your heart flutter, like it was giving out finally.”
    Fowler kneeled beside Tyree. “You’re a tough one, all right, and mighty hard to kill. I did what I could for you, cleaned the bullet wounds in your side, then plugged them up with prickly pear pulp. The Indians use it to stop inflammation and infection and I guess they know what they’re doing.”
    Tyree’s hand strayed to his neck and Fowler nodded. “Your skin is badly burned by the rope. Couldn’t do much for that except boil up some thistle blossom and bathe the burns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess we’ll find out.”
    “What happened?” Tyree asked, the two words coming hard and painful from his torn-up throat.
    A slight smile touched Fowler’s lips. “Well, near as I can tell, you were half-hung, then shot. I was riding west of here, getting reacquainted with the land on account of how I’ve been away for a fair spell, and I saw Clem Daley and Len Dawson leading a saddled dun across the flats.